Childrens Yoga

Doing yoga with your child is fun. It is a good moment for you to connect with your child in a playful and yet conscious manner. For the parent is good to move the body and to use your imagination and in that way connect with your child on their level. For the child this is a fun way to connect to their body and breath without mentioning that specifically. Also you can beautifully integrate relaxations in here again in a light way connecting it to a story.

The ‘heart’ of the yoga that you do is making up a story and integrating different poses in the story. So for example you are going into a forest in a country very far from here and meet all kinds of animals, such as a lion, a very big dog, a cobra, etc. Anytime you meet this animal together you can imitate the animal with your body. Also you see many trees (Tree Pose) and you can imitate the wind blowing (to practice different types of breathing).

You can see that there are in numerous possibilities here and destinations where you can travel so let your mind become flexible and flow and go wherever 🙂 Children themselves have great fantasy so let them join in wherever you go and what is happening on the way.

If your child has friends coming over you can nicely do this in a small group. If you want to do this with a group of children that don’t know each other very well than you might want to introduce a name game at the start. You could for example ask every one to say their name and after that make a gesture or funny dance pose and after everyone can repeat. Before diving into the Story you can star off with a fun game such as 1,2,3-Yoga Tree: one child faces the wall and the others are at the other end of the room. The child calls out ‘1,2,3-yoga tree and turns around. While calling out the other children can run but have to freeze into a Tree Pose when the child has turned around. The one who has reached the other end of the room first wins and if you didn’t freeze in time you are out of the game.

A very short relaxation up to two minutes is good. If you have mats or blankets you can ask them to roll up into a donut and lay down, or play sleeping lion (together make a roaring sound and after that be quiet for one to two minutes). Or if you want to work in pairs you can ask one child to listen to the breathing through the belly button of the other.

Name game

Start with a game (difficult to start at the mat) e.g. 123 Yoga Tree or Stop/Dance (stop and make a pose or touch finger/nose)

Sit to bring everybody together (e.g. human mandala or King of the Dance or King of Yoga)

Yoga Story

Game (because they are sitting long at the mat)

Savasana (yoga hotdog or just laying down one by oe, the other observing the others breath, or hand at the stomach of the other) or sleeping lion (make lion sound and then be quiet for 1 minute)

Angel’s Walk

Google You tube: cosmic kids yoga for more

Merel Martens

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This is part one of a two-part series on Intuition. Written by Emily Curtis for Parimukti Part 1: Addicted to wanting to know When learning a trade, a language, or perhaps when we’re next in Read more…